November 17, 2002

PEOPLE always ask me if, as a writer, I loved writing as a child. The answer may surprise you: I hated writing and always thought I was no good at it.

I remember being in sixth grade and watching with a ten year old’s burning jealousy as my classmates always got better grades in their writing assignments than I did. Omair Habib always got a 9 out of 10 because he used six adjectives in front of every noun, producing such sentences as: “The happy, healthy, short, brown-haired, eight year old boy stepped into the warm, shining, cozy, nicely-decorated room and looked at the majestic, wonderful, rough, green, stormy sea through the clean, bright, sparkling glass window.”

Aki Hiramoto, a Japanese girl, also got high grades because she had a handwriting that looked as though a master calligrapher had composed her essays. She also handed in her pieces accompanied by beautifully-drawn illustrations that she coloured in with pastel crayons. I had to be content with only 6 or 7 out of 10 for my plain, adjective- and illustration-less stories, and in my world, that was a disaster.

Ask me if I loved reading as a child, though, and the answer is a resounding “yes”. I grew up on books as I grew up on air, food, and water. My earliest memories are of being read to as a child, and being naturally very shy, books were my constant companions.

I started off with the usual picture books and nursery rhymes that most children are introduced to at preschool ages. One of my favourite picture book series was the one by author and illustrator Richard Scarry. Despite his frightening-sounding name, Scarry is best-known for writing Richard Scarry’s best word book ever, a treasure trove of page after page of scenes from household and daily life where every single item is illustrated and named. This was a perfect way for me to learn about the items that filled the world.

When I was ready for stories with plots, I began with a set of Disney books, in which Disney characters enacted famous fairy tales, folk tales, and other popular yarns. My favourite was Button Soup, in which Daisy Duck is resourceful enough to feed a whole town on a soup made out of a “single button”. I was also introduced to Dr Seuss and his famous children’s books, which delighted generations with their madcap wordplay, imaginative characters, and off-the-wall plots.

You may know Dr Seuss’s most famous creation, The cat in the hat, who comes into the house of an ordinary boy and girl and manages to make a tremendous mess out of everything in the house. This particularly disturbed me because I was always worried about how the children would fix things before their parents came home to punish them. Luckily, the cat in the hat always repented for his sins and helped the children clean up the mess he had made.

A third series that I loved was the one about King Babar, Queen Celeste, and their royal adventures in Paris (in case you don’t know, Babar is an elephant). My parents and I would have tremendous arguments about whether Babar was pronounced Babar, (the French style) or Babar (as in the Mughal king), but despite the debate, I still loved the stories and the drawings of Babar in his magnificent green suit and golden crown.

When I was five, I was given a wonderful gift — Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the chocolate factory. I was too young to read the book myself, so my mother would read it to me every night before bedtime. What child could resist the lure of an entire factory devoted to making chocolate? With wonderful images of a garden made of chocolate and candy, children chewing gum and blowing up into giant blueberries, and the great glass elevator that bursts out of the top of the factory at the end of the story, this is one of the most vivid books I can ever remember reading.

Another gift came in the form of a book called The velveteen rabbit, or how toys become real, accompanied by an actual velveteen rabbit that you could hug as you read the story. This timeless classic by Margery Williams was about a boy who receives a rabbit and grows to love him long after the rabbit has become worn out and furless; it is then that the rabbit becomes real. It was a good lesson in the importance of loyalty to your oldest friends, and I remember the story long after my own velveteen rabbit was given away, shapeless and moth-eaten.

At around eight, I became interested in comic books. You may think that comics are a frivolous waste of time but I found endless hours of amusement in Asterix and Obelix, Tintin, Mad Magazine, and Archie comics. When I went back as an adult and reread some of the old issues, I was amazed to see how intelligently written these comics were, with many jokes and gags ranging from the subtly humorous to the downright hysterical. Archie comics, of course, remain as brainless as ever, and I have a good mind of writing to the editors that Archie and the gang convert to Islam so that Archie can just marry both Betty and Veronica and get it over with.

As I got older, I enjoyed the American childhood classics, most particularly the Little house on the prairie series that describes the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder as a girl growing up in the age of the pioneers. The books were much more lively and entertaining than the cheesy television series, and I loved the illustrations by Garth Williams almost as much as the words themselves. I was disappointed to find out later that Wilder was quite a monster in real life, as opposed to the gentle, adventurous little girl she portrayed herself as in her books.

Two other series that I loved were Louisa May Alcott’s Little women books, and a set of books by John Fitzgerald called The great brain. Everyone is familiar with Alcott’s story of four girls growing up in post-Civil War Boston and how they relied on each other to get through the hard times and poverty. Not everyone may be familiar, though, with the “Great Brain”, a Catholic boy in a family of four brothers living amongst Mormons in nineteenth century Utah. The great brain earned his nickname because he always came up with money making schemes that were completely dishonest in nature, some that he got away with, and others that were dismal failures. The illustrations by famous author and artist Maurice Sendak brought his shenanigans to life as I poured over the books again and again.

I grew older and became interested in science fiction and fantasy. One series which stands out in my mind is the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. The Narnia chronicles, including The lion, the witch and the wardrobe, The silver chair, The horse and his boy, were about the adventures of four children in a magical land called Narnia, whose ruler was the noble lion Aslan. As an adult I later learned that the stories were C.S. Lewis’s way of introducing Christian theology to children, but I can attest that I wasn’t in the least tempted to convert to Christianity, and truly loved those stories with all my heart.

The last book that was my greatest influence in my childhood, before I entered my teenaged years is Anne Frank: the diary of a young girl. My mother bought this book for me when I was about eleven, and although she wanted me to wait till I was a little older to read it, I sneaked it out of the shopping bag and read it cover to cover anyway.

The story of the Jewish girl, who hid with six other Jews in an Amsterdam attic to avoid being captured by the Nazis during the second world war, simply bowled me over. Anne’s narrative, in the form of diary entries, show her as she grows from a feisty thirteen year old into a fifteen year old mature beyond her years, and how, even under her extraordinary circumstances, she expressed beautifully the thoughts and feelings of a regular teenager. Anne’s greatest ambition in life was to be a writer and to be famous long beyond her death. She managed to fulfil her ambition, and I can see now that her ambition influenced me greatly in my own career choice. My love of books metamorphosed into a desire to write, like Anne, and I still re-read her diary from time to time and draw inspiration from her life story.

So the books that were my greatest friends as children led me into what I would most love doing as an adult, and sometimes, it’s really been like a fairytale come true.

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